Simple Email MCP Server

A provider-agnostic MCP server for email (IMAP/SMTP). Works with any email provider — Purelymail, Gmail, Outlook, DomainFactory, or any standard IMAP/SMTP server. The simple email mcp mcp server wraps that behind the Model Context Protocol, so an assistant can use it through 14 defined tools rather than through you.

What it actually does

• Multi-account — — manage multiple email accounts from different providers
• Read, search, list — — full IMAP support with folder browsing
• Send emails — — plain text, HTML, or both (multipart/alternative)
• Attachments — — send via file path or base64-encoded inline data
• Download attachments — — extract attachments from received emails as base64
• Calendar invites — — send proper ICS invitations with Accept/Decline buttons

Adding it to your client

simple-email-mcp on PyPI is all you need. Most clients run it directly, so configuration is a few lines and a restart.

Its toolset

Everything the assistant can do here goes through one of these:

• Action — Description
• validate_config — Validate config without logging into IMAP/SMTP
• list_accounts — List configured accounts
• list_folders — List IMAP folders for an account
• list_emails — List recent emails in a folder
• search — Search emails using IMAP criteria
• read — Read full email content by UID
• get_attachment — Download an attachment as base64
• prepare_attachments — Inspect local attachment paths before sending
• save_attachment — Save an attachment directly to disk (preferred for large files)
• send — Send an email (text, HTML, attachments, calendar invites)
• reply — Reply to an email (auto-sets recipient, subject, threading, quotes body)

Configuration

You will need 2 environment variables: IMAP_HOST, SMTP_HOST. Keep credentials in your client's env block or a secrets manager rather than in a file you might commit.

Caveats

• It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
• With 14 tools registered it takes up a noticeable share of the context window; turn it off in projects that never touch Simple Email MCP.
• MCP clients confirm each tool call by default. Leave that on until you have watched what the simple email mcp mcp server does with a few real requests.

When to reach for it

This sits in the team communication group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. Simple Email MCP's toolset — Action, validate_config, list_accounts and 11 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by mexican75; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

We check each listing at SyncDev against the project's documentation before it goes live — if something here drifts out of date, it is a bug worth reporting.